“Kingsman: The Secret Service” borrows the tone, story, characters and humor of “Kick-Ass,” only this time in a 007 world instead of Batman’s. Nearly everything it does, it does poorly: This one is “Weak-Ass.”
This time the boy and girl transformed into the bane of supervillains by a father figure are Brits Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and Roxy (Sophie Cookson), whose James Bond-style mentor (Colin Firth) is a member of a secret order of contemporary spy-knights, the Kingsman, led by a sort of King Arthur (Michael Caine).
Directed (like “Kick-Ass”) by Matthew Vaughn, “Kingsman” is a mad clutter of “Austin Powers”-style parody, campy comedy and gory action. It’s like a salad composed of lettuce, tomatoes, butterscotch pudding, raw liver and motor oil.
As the baddie who plots to destroy the world to the tune of a KC and the Sunshine Band song, Samuel L. Jackson does a bizarre lisp and seems to be in an entirely different movie from Firth, who plays it more or less straight as a debonair James Bond. The movie is so desperate to be irreverent that a captive princess says to the hero, “If you save the world, we can do it in the a - - hole.” Isn’t it romantic?
“Austin Powers” knew the way to do a Bond spoof was full-on comedy, not with screeching tonal shifts from scene to scene. Sequences in which the tryouts for the Kingsman wake up to find their barracks flooding over their heads, or are tossed out of an airplane and learn that one of them has no parachute, are excitingly filmed, but there’s so much goofing off surrounding these bits that the characters seem disposable. Jackson’s villain, meanwhile, is not only not interesting, he’s just plain ridiculous, neither threatening nor funny.
“Kingsman” thinks it’s clever to have characters discuss what kind of movie they’re in and whether the psychopath should come up with a convoluted method to kill the hero. That kind of meta-joke went stale years ago, though: This martini is neither shaken nor stirred. It’s spilled all over the place, leaving you with a mess instead of a buzz.